Vice capitalizes on climate change hysteria
December 16, 2021
It’s the media hyping of climate change that is actually harming people. This is what Vice and others need to understand, it is they causing the harm, their articles and general hysteria, not climate change itself.
Vice ran a piece claiming that “Worrying About the Climate Crisis Is Affecting People’s Relationships and Sex Lives” that insists that “[t]he climate crisis has driven people to feel what some call “eco-anxiety,” or anxiety over the impending demise of the environment.”
The important thing to know is that climate change isn’t doing anything of that. Media reporting on climate change is causing all of it.
The actual science – yes, the real stuff from the International Panel on Climate Change – says that climate change is a chronic problem that can be easily enough solved. Move the energy system, over decades, to a non-fossil fuel-based system and we’re largely done. Much of the difficult work has already been done too. Bringing down the price of solar power for example, as we’re repeatedly told that’s now cheaper than coal.
It is actually in the models of the IPCC what will happen if we do that. Make solar and wind cheap, as we have done. Climate change as a problem then goes away soon enough and before any real damage.
What’s causing this angst among the young is that none of the usual media outlets – and Vice is just as guilty as anyone else – tells them this. Instead, they’re faced with a barrage of insistences that the world is about to end.
Vice is a major source of information for millennials — the magazine has a run of 900,000 copies. The TV station appears in 60 million American households, the website gains near 30 million visits a month. It’s a major media outlet for those young suffering these worries about climate change.
Vice would be doing its audience a significant favor by presenting them with the truth about climate change. It is a problem, but not an immediate nor catastrophic one and much of what needs to be done already is.
True, perhaps we shouldn’t be encouraging those young to go and have even more sex but scaring them out of it through the sensationalization of climate change is the media’s fault, not anyone else’s. Most certainly not being caused by climate change itself as that’s just not an immediate problem anyway.